‘Well, Detective Inspector, if I’m asked I’ll say that police experts have cast doubts on the witchcraft theory and if anyone perseveres, I’ll refer them to you.’
Hanlon nodded. ‘Fine by me, sir. The SIO is copying me in on their findings and I’ll summarize it for you. It’ll be on your desk the day after tomorrow.’ She stood up. ‘If that’s everything, sir? I’ve got an appointment, if you don’t mind.’
Corrigan waved her away absent-mindedly. He had a briefing to give to the London Assembly and was behind his own self-imposed schedule. More issues with trigger-happy policemen. Sometimes his own force seemed more trouble than the criminals. Hanlon left his office.
She signed herself out of the building and crossed the road to the art-deco St James’s Park Underground where she walked down to the Circle and District line. Victoria Street was a mass of snarled traffic. As she waited for a westbound train, she checked the time again on her BlackBerry: 8.30 a.m. She had emailed DS Whiteside, her former colleague from the Serious and Organized Crime Group, just before she entered the station.
After the riot incident, SCD 7 had washed their hands of Hanlon, but although they were finished with her she still had unfinished business with a case she’d been involved with at the time. Hanlon didn’t like unresolved business. Whiteside’s reply confirmed they were still on. Their target was alone, and at home.
Hanlon rode the tube train two stops down to Sloane Square and exited there. She walked up into the wide-open plaza that reminded her of a European city in its spaciousness, not London with its typically narrow streets like a turned-up collar against the rain, and looked at the Peter Jones store opposite. Hanlon was no great fan of shopping, nor of Sloane Rangers, the ostentatiously wealthy women who frequented the area, but she did like buildings and the sinuous late-1920s art-deco lines of the large shop gave her a great deal of pleasure.
She walked through the expensive streets, moving quickly out of the borders of the exclusive areas of Chelsea and into the marginally less price-tag-heavy Fulham. A one-bedroom flat here would still be about a dozen times her annual salary, if not more. You didn’t have to deal drugs to live in Fulham, but it helped.
Although her legs still ached from the hour she’d put in at the gym between six and seven, before her 8 a.m. meeting with Corrigan, she was enjoying the walk. She loved the streets of London with a visceral passion. Today she’d been working on her thighs, calves and shoulders, high-weight, low-repetition work, and she could still feel the muscles protesting. She ignored them. She was old schooclass="underline" no pain, no gain. Hanlon’s gym was defiantly old-fashioned, full of free weights, barbells and dumb-bells, its soundtrack being grunts of effort and clanking metal.
Her eyes softened slightly as she saw the well-dressed figure of DS Whiteside sitting on a low wall at a corner of the street where their target lived. Today the sergeant looked like an Indie rocker in tight skinny jeans and a fashionably distressed leather jacket. The clothes emphasized the powerful body beneath rather than concealing it. As she waited to cross the road to join him, a couple of Sloaney girls walked past her, frankly ogling him as they did so. She heard one say to the other, ‘He’s a bit of all right.’ The other replied, lasciviously, flicking back her glossy long hair with an expensively manicured hand, ‘Yah! I most certainly wouldn’t say no!’ Hanlon shook her head sadly. You really are barking up the wrong tree, she said mentally to the young girls as they disappeared along the pavement.
She crossed over to where Whiteside was sitting. He smiled up at her, supremely confident as ever. He had, she reflected, an insanely optimistic attitude on life.
‘Did you know you’re a babe magnet, Sergeant?’ she asked.
‘Morning, ma’am. Some of us have got it, and some of us haven’t,’ he said, with a grin.
He’s ridiculously attractive, thought Hanlon.
‘Shall we go and wake young Toby up?’
She nodded. ‘Let’s go then.’
They crossed the road together. Whiteside’s eyes were gleaming with pleasure at working with Hanlon again. Life had been so boring without her.
Toby Manning had a basement flat and the two of them walked down the steep stairs that led off the pavement, in single file. They stood in the stairwell next to some dead potted plants while Whiteside rang the bell. He looked at the plants. Toby’s gardening skills were not the best. He had to ring three times before they heard a muffled ‘All right, OK, I’m coming’ from within. There was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and then the door opened a crack and a bleary, unshaven face appeared.
With one practised, synchronized movement, Whiteside shouldered both Toby and the door back, Hanlon stepped regally inside and Whiteside wheeled round, closed the door and leant against it, while Toby stood with his back to a wall, wearing nothing but a dressing gown and a puzzled, frightened look.
‘Who-’ he began to say. The sergeant had no intention of letting Toby speak. He wanted to establish in Toby’s slow mind who was in control. Whiteside grabbed Toby by the lapels of the ragged dressing gown and roughly pushed him into the centre of his own living room where Hanlon was now standing, looking around her with an air of distaste.
‘Sit down, Toby,’ she ordered, pointing to a scruffy-looking armchair. The flat was probably worth between half to three-quarters of a million in its SW6 location, but inside it was a dump. Toby did as he was told. The living room hadn’t been cleaned in a while and smelt of stale cigarette smoke, grass and old booze. There was still a half-smoked joint in an ashtray on a coffee table. Next to it a folded wrap of paper and a mirror. There was an underlying sweet/sour smell of rotting food from the kitchen.
Hanlon produced a warrant card and held it in front of Toby’s face. She leant forward, invading his personal space, literally in his face.
‘We’re police.’
Toby had shoulder-length permed hair and lined, unhealthily pale features. He looked as if he’d wandered in from another era. Hanlon guessed he didn’t really keep up with current trends except narcotics. His lifestyle was catching up with him quickly. His arms and legs beneath the short, silk dressing gown were pallid and thin. Hanlon knew he was only twenty-nine, but he could have passed for forty in the struggling sunlight from the uncleaned windows that dimly transformed the native gloom of the basement into a murky greyness.
‘You look like shit, Toby,’ said Hanlon conversationally. ‘Like you’ve crawled out from under a rock.’
There was a sideboard in the living room and Whiteside had pulled a drawer open. He slipped a pair of latex gloves over his fingers.
Toby looked alarmed. ‘What are you doing?’ he said in a dry, frightened tone. ‘Have you got a search warrant?’ His voice was expensively educated. It went with the flat in a way that the rest of Toby didn’t. Hanlon knew that Toby was a Trustafarian whose private income and accommodation provided by his tax-exile parents did not cover his drug expenditure, so he had turned to coke dealing to his friends and acquaintances to make ends meet. He was an amateur dealer, now hopelessly out of his depth, and beginning to realize it.
‘Ma’am?’ said Whiteside. He was looking into the open drawer. You beauty, he was thinking to himself. There, in the drawer, were electronic scales, a zip-loc bag of white powder, a plastic screw-top container of dextrose that he assumed was for cutting the coke and another transparent plastic bag containing small, wrapped packages, like miniature origami envelopes, that Whiteside guessed would contain one gram deals of coke. He lifted this out of the drawer and held it up. Toby looked at it with fear.